The Daily Swarm

Macworld:

Celemony used Frankfurt, Germany’s Musikmesse tradeshow to announce the next version of its Melodyne voice and instrument tuning plug-in. Among the new features is giving users direct access to individual notes in a polyphonic sound file.

Melodyne plug-in 2 gives users the ability to correct segments of audio that are off pitch or out of tune. Compatible with VST, AU and RTAS compatible host applications like Cubase, Logic and Pro Tools, users can utilize the plug-in in automatic mode or adjust segments manually.

With its new direct note access, the plug-in’s editor display zooms in on the polyphonic audio material so you can see the individual notes. You will now have access to the pitch, position in time and duration of each note as well as its vibrato, pitch drift, formant spectrum and volume.

Melodyne will allow users to correct a wrong note within a piano recording, tidy up the timing of the individual notes of a chord and even retune an out-of-tune guitar after the recording has already taken place.

Sound on Sound:

Pitch-correction software is by no means new; it’s been around for over a decade. But so far, it has only worked effectively on monophonic sources, such as vocals and lead instruments. Until now, that is.

Celemony, developers of the Melodyne pitch-correction application, have announced Direct Note Access (DNA), a new technology that can shift the pitch and timing of individual notes of a polyphonic recording, such as a melodic guitar or piano track.

With Direct Note Access, individual notes of a chord are displayed in Melodyne’s piano roll-style GUI, such that they can be dragged around to wherever the user chooses. Furthermore, notes can be muted, so both the rhythmic and melodic content of the audio can be completely transformed.

Celemony say that once DNA has hit the market, studio engineers and producers will be able to think the same way about piano takes, for example, as they do currently with vocal recordings, where a slight blemish can be ‘fixed’ at a later date. This could change the way studio sessions run, and reduce the requirement for overdubbing or re-recording entire takes after minor player errors.

But it’s not just achieving perfect takes that Direct Note Access is capable of. Using the pitch-shifting and time-stretching capabilities to their extremes, some fairly radical effects can be created. But also, melodic material can be transposed, so if you fancy changing a guitar solo from major to minor, you can do so with just a few mouse-clicks.